Month: January 2009

Julian Sanchez wonders about virtual picket lines:

…think ahead a couple years to when mobile devices at least as advanced as the current iPhone are as ubiquitous as cell phones.This makes physical environments potentially dense with information, whether through particular function-specific channels (Zagat reviews), socially salient tags (3 of your friends had a comment about this restaurant), aggregative filtering (a comment about this location was voted above your Digg threshold), or some combination thereof. The purpose of this won’t necessarily be to facilitate activism—people are more likely to want to look at reviews or know if there are better prices down the block. But it also means that political information can be embedded in a place without requiring a bunch of people with placards to spend their day marching around in front of a shop.

…the potential here is to drastically lower the information costs of consumer activism. Relatively few people are going to sit down and do detailed research about all the products they routinely buy. Many more, however, may be willing to whip out their phones and click a couple buttons. When the effort required to import political values into consumption decisions is dramatically reduced, the number of politically-conscious shoppers should increase significantly.

Shopping with an iPhone strikes me as a huge boon to both political and economic market efficiency.

Billings, Montana, 4.45 pm

A reader writes:

Quoting you:

I love the emails. It’s wondrous to me how much time and effort people put into them when they know they will get no recognition – but that anonymity also brings out more honesty and passion. People write because they feel strongly about something and that comes across.

I think the dynamic of communicating with you through e-mail has always lended your blog a certain personal quality that I’ve never seen elsewhere.  On most blogs where there are comments, I always feel I’m talking to an audience.  But when I e-mail you I feel like I’m actually talking to you.  So I find that much of the time I say things that I think you’ll find interesting that aren’t necessarily of interest to the world at large.

The end result is that I always feel a lot more personally engaged with what you write.  I find I enjoy the writing of many other bloggers but that when I read your blog it’s more like I’m reading something a friend has posted.  Especially when you drift into topics like religion or conservative philosophy that I can’t imagine appearing on just about any other major blog.

In your dreams. Here it is at last: a gay alphabet!

"The gold–or quicksilver–for which we are all panning lasts only a second, or a few seconds, but it is buried beneath years of longing. Every wave that is caught has a history, extending both outside and inside ourselves. Outside, its history reaches over the horizon to some distant weather event–the fact of a storm in the Southern Ocean setting off a chain of natural events that delivers a wave for me five days later in Sydney is still something I find, frankly, miraculous; a gift from heaven.

Inside myself the layers of history behind a wave are even more important, because whenever I start paddling in front of that green wall of water, hoping I have timed my line so that I will arrive at the exact point and angle to maximise my speed and stability on take-off, I hold within me the years of having admired surfers before I did it myself; the defiance of doubt that such a complex act, balancing on a moving fibreglass board upon a moving, shifting shape of a liquid substance is possible at all; the years of practice and frustration; the aches and injuries; the disappointment of so many crap or crowded days; the clashes and intimidation from tougher surfers–all of this lies behind me as I paddle for this wave," – Malcolm Knox, Intelligent Life.

(Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty.)

Kim Keever’s landscape photos have more in common with landscape painting than modern photography. A description of the work:

…the large-scale photographs of New York based artist Kim Keever are meticulously created by photographing miniature topographies inside a large fish tank. The pictures appear to be based on traditional landscape paintings, but the process is any thing but traditional. keever sculpts miniature landscapes inside the tank, which is then filled with water. coloured lights and pigments creates dense, atmospheric environments that make the small scenes come to life.

More here.

William Saletan on how tobacco is defeating the anti-smoking crusaders.

New and improved:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

(hat tip: Crooked Timber)

Matt Welch tangles with Larison, a Kossack, and me:

Obama is skillfully turning the meaning of the word "bipartisan" into "the coalition that agrees with my magnanimous self." All this "political suicide" talk serves his conscious goal of peeling off enough scared and/or squishy Republicans to turn his already impressive majority into something positively Reaganesque. So that he can even more smoothly carry out the urgent bipartisan business of installing Big Labor in the West Wing.

A lovely article in the Egyptian press:

…no one can stand in the face of [the American Zionist lobby’s] unlimited greed. They want everything: wealth, power and advocates. And if the president does not work to their benefit, they will “politically assassinate” him or bring his life to an end. This is exactly what happened to late Democratic president, John Kennedy, in the ‘60s. So, we do not have to feel exceedingly optimistic.